Mapping Spiritual Innovation: An Interview with Researcher Hannah Petersen

Glean Network and the Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, in partnership with innoFaith and Faith Matters Network, participated in a national field study titled Mapping Spiritual Innovation. This study represents the first concerted effort to describe and understand emerging initiatives as traditional congregations, and, in some cases, broader religious institutions, experience decline. We spoke with principal researcher Hannah Petersen to share insights uncovered during the development of the working paper.

From Sociology to Spiritual Innovation

Glean Network: Hannah, thank you for joining us. To start, could you share a bit about your background and how you came into this project?

Hannah: Sure. I did my undergraduate degree in sociology at Hamilton, where I researched education, inequality, and DEI in higher education. That work confirmed for me that I wanted to pursue original research.

When I came to Brandeis, I discovered this project on American religion spearheaded by Dr. Wendy Cadge. At first, I hadn’t studied the sociology of religion in depth, but I realized the questions it was asking about where spirituality and religion are headed were the very questions I was asking myself. There's all of these trends that everybody's talking about. Congregations are declining. There's more people who are spiritual but not religious (SBNR). And how do we understand what's happening? How is religion being conserved? How are people observing it? All of these things. So I think it was a desire to get better sociological research and being able to do that kind of boots on the ground and have a real stake in that. And this is actually a topic that I find incredibly interesting. And I think a lot of people find really impactful and are questioning for themselves, how do we do this in a more formalized manner?

What Sociology Reveals About Religion

Glean Network: For people who may not be familiar: What exactly does sociological research entail, especially when it comes to religion?

Hannah: Sociology looks at human behavior across different levels. All of us are part of organizations in some capacity. How do we operate in those organizations? And then how do those organizations put different prerogatives on us? So, in this instance of spiritual innovation, we would look at:

• Micro (individuals): people’s personal spiritual journeys.

• Meso (organizations): how groups like congregations or innovative communities function.

• Macro (societal): broader cultural or systemic shifts.
  

This project studied spiritual innovation at all three levels. With this project, we used both quantitative data (like surveys) and qualitative data (like interviews). We used surveys to map macro-level trends and in-depth interviews to capture meso and micro-level stories. Personally, I found the interviews most compelling—asking leaders why they started their groups, how they reimagined traditions, and how they hoped to create social change.

Defining Spiritual Innovation

Glean Network: The project defines “spiritual innovation” in a very specific way. Why was it important to start with that definition?

Hannah: We defined spiritually innovative groups (as opposed to individuals) as those inspired by the world's religious traditions to create social change. That framing matters because it shows we’re not just talking about personal meaning-making at the micro level, but also organizational and societal transformation. In order to conduct the research, we have to create parameters to clearly define what we are trying to understand.

For example, one Boston group reimagined monastic living (meso-level) to address housing insecurity (macro-level). That's a really clear example of what we mean when something is still reliant and dependent on religious and spiritual traditions, and they find validity in them. Simultaneously, they're addressing issues and problems on the ground and trying to make it relevant in new ways. Because again, I think what we're trying to get at, too, is, is there a movement going on? I use movement lightly, but is there some concerted, aggregated effort that is moving away from traditional congregational formats into new models?

Leaders and Seekers Meeting in the Middle

Glean Network: As you interviewed leaders, what patterns or surprises emerged?

Hannah: A big pattern was that leaders often came from traditional religious training. But in congregations, much of their time went to maintaining the institution, resourcing the building or rather than serving people. So these leaders often went on to create new groups, and often at great risk and personal sacrifice. Simultaneously, many spiritually curious people outside of traditional congregations were looking for guidance. So there’s this meeting in the middle: trained leaders seeking impact and seekers hungry for wisdom in new forms.

Building an Ecosystem of Support

Glean Network:  If you had more time and resources, what would you have liked to study further?

Hannah: I’d love to do a longitudinal study—tracking what makes groups sustainable over time. Leaders are sacrificing a lot, and many feel isolated. I heard over and over again, “I’m the only one doing this.”

But parallel experiments are happening everywhere. That’s where organizations like Glean Network and Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, innoFaith and Faith Matters Network matter: they operate at the meso-level as connectors, making it easier for innovative leaders to build communities that have macro-level social impact.

Lessons for Congregational Leaders

Glean Network: What perspective from this research might be valuable for existing and established congregational leaders who are navigating this time of change and transformation?

Hannah: I wouldn’t say congregations are obsolete at all. In fact, many new groups show how tradition can be reimagined, not discarded. The key is imagination.

At the micro level, congregations can empower individuals to innovate. At the meso level, they can loosen hierarchy and share leadership. At the macro level, they can align with broader movements for justice and belonging.

About the Mapping Spiritual Innovation Project:

Abstract of “Mapping Spiritual Innovation: Initial Findings”

This working paper is a first effort to describe and begin to understand new efforts emerging as traditional congregations, and in some cases broader religious institutions, are in decline. We focus specifically on groups, not individuals, started since 2008, that are inspired by the world’s religious traditions to create social change (i.e. change outside of themselves), often but not always by disrupting traditional delivery systems, providing different aspects of those traditions, and/or translating them in new ways. We understand social change broadly as efforts – regardless of content – that aim to make a contribution to the public good such as through charitable work, political advocacy, community building or in other ways. We exclude from our approach efforts focused only on creating new spiritual or religious communities absent the creation of a new delivery system or explicit intent for those communities to make some change in the world. As we did in our earlier work studying chaplaincy, we begin this conversation on the supply side, with a focus on spiritual innovators themselves. More research is necessary to understand the demand side, or the spiritual “consumer.”

We thank our multiple collaborators for their support of this work. You can read more about this project here.